28th August 2011

It’s been a busy time in the studio over recent weeks. I think I’ve completed composition for my twelve-tone serial collection, I just need a good piano sound for three of those tracks. The rest will be electro-acoustic and more experimental in sound. I’ve also been contacting a few labels in regards to a couple of other projects I’ve been working on. I’ve received positive response about the pure music electro-acoustic pieces I mentioned in a previous entry, but won’t know any more until later in the year about that. I’m also sending out stuff for some more piano and string based music I’ve been working on with a ghostly theme. I’m very proud of the tracks, but an interesting thing happened during recording sessions: I recorded a piece for solo guitar, and really enjoyed the writing, recording and listening process, moreso than using samples and a piano synth at the computer. I decided then that from now (for a while at least, I change my mind often enough to make no permanent promises!) I want to actually stick to instruments I have. I’d like to get more instruments and work with them. Instead of going “I want to write music for these instruments”, I want to take the approach of arranging the music around what I have: a continuation of the self-limited sample palette I chose as a response to the over-indulgence in wide ranging synthesisers. I’ll still be using samples in an electro-acoustic way, but it might be a nice challenge to return to actual music – composition and performance – instead of sitting at a computer screen clicking buttons.

In other news, I’ve shifted over the physical releases from Jerky Oats on to a new label, Bullfinch Records. I want to release some electro-acoustic, modern classical and ambient music on CD in DIY packaging, and have a few artists lined up for release. It’ll be starting next year hopefully, and I want to release 2-3 CDs a year. Having a fresh label will not only help promote things, but also Jerky Oats really is a terrible name, thoroughly unsuitable for serious electro-acoustic music. So it’s much more fitting. Wish me luck!

13th August 2011

At relatively short notice, Leaf Pass is out today, which can be downloaded for free by clicking here, courtesy of Treetrunk Records. I recently described the album as ‘the best accident I’ve ever had’ – it began life as a couple of longform Canal Seven-style pieces on a collection called Habitats 1-3, but I was just never very happy with it so I scrapped the release. Then, for reasons unknown to me, I decided to merge it together and split it into 16 tracks a la a normal album, and it all came together perfectly into a record I’m really proud of. Some of the material on the album is new stuff, some is very old – pre-Purlieu, from the Twenty-Four demo disc, for those of you who still remember it – but it all sits together nicely. The presence of pre-Purlieu material, combined with the sunny rural sounding beginnings, moving on to a more sinister end section, came together to make the album a bit of a prequel to Purlieu really. It’s a bit of a diversion from the modern classical direction of the last couple of albums and what’s to come, and was released now as a way to tie things up with Second Thought. This is the last of the five major albums.

I always intended to do linking albums, although it was never meant to end this way. I had four albums planned: Purlieu and Vacuum Road Songs, then Dead Hymns, a dark ambient/industrial album which had the listener going through a sort of ‘personal hell’, followed by Crib Goch, a spiritual reawakening based around piano and string pieces that would end the series. Instead, the hell was replaced by myths and ghost stories of Safernoc, and I took things one step further by tying the last album up as a memory of how the journey began. That this managed to come out just as Second Thought was ending is a wonderful coincidence and basically makes me very happy.

Anyway, Leaf Pass is out now. A CDr version will be working its way to a few special people who’ve supported me and bought the other albums over the years. That’s the end of Second Thought, musically, the last new material to come out, the end of the story that some people have been following since 2002/2003 when I started work on material that made its way onto this album and Purlieu. It’s been quite a ride. I hope you enjoy the album!

3rd August 2011

Some of the pieces I mentioned in the previous two entries fall into the ‘pure music’ category – music that exists for the sake of it, music that has no meaning, no definition, is not intended to be evocative of a particular atmosphere or image, but simply be beautiful music. The one thing that I’m learning is that this approach can lead to some very beautiful music, but is not one I will be following much in the future, probably due to the fact that most of the music I listen to is on the atmospheric/evocative side. It’s been a very enjoyable experiment and I’ve been learning a lot about music. One of the pieces still needs some more live instruments, and I’m committed to finishing it all and putting it out at some point, as I’m proud of what I’m making. It’s just helping me refine my future working process in a way I wasn’t expecting it to at first…

20th July 2011

Expanding upon the ideas I was working on the other day, I’ve been playing with more instrument + field recording manipulations. The last one came out rather nicely, and might stand up well enough by itself. This time it’s a bit more abstract, slight similarities with my side of the Oncoming Storm split with Noisesurfer, so I think it’ll need more work. I’ve decided I can’t just leave stuff at ‘good enough’, I want to make the tracks as good as possible, keep working on them until they’re better than I imagined they would be. So live, acoustic instrumentation will be added at some point in the future, probably when I have it around me. I might split the longform track into sections, too, parts 1-4 or whatever. It’s a nice way to be working, as it’s currently entirely improvised, which comes as a complete contrast to my experiments with composing using twelve tone serial techniques. That isn’t doing much for me or my mood at the moment, so I’ve put those on the back burner and I’m considering other ideas currently. I’ll return to them at a later date. I’d really like to get more instruments, and get the instruments I own back with me – it’ll be nice to write for acoustic instruments after such a long time of in-computer sounds. I always used to put a huge array of sounds and instruments on my music back in the day, I want to get back to that process again. A mixture of computer manipulation and live performance is probably the most enjoyable way to work for me.

Stuff I have been enjoying recently:

Xedh – Vinduskarm
Max Richter – Songs from Before
Deaf Center – Pale Ravine
Gavin Bryars – Piano works
Sibelius – Symphonies 2 & 4

12th July 2011

I’ve finally got the Curse of Kevin Carter website sorted and online. The Curse of Kevin Carter is basically the final version of a band which started a very long time ago and mentioned on this blog way back in probably 2004. The initial line-up was that of myself, Thom and Ste, and we were going to be joined by Jo, Pete, Tom, Claire and Liam, but this never came to pass. We did record a few demos, a couple of which are still around. Eventually it whittled down to myself and Ste, and moved on from slightly jangly indie stuff to a kind of post-punk influenced sound, but that never really went anywhere; we went our separate ways, and he went on to play in the more shoegaze-inspired Eleanor Everything. Around the same time I began to put ideas together with Thom again. This took the punk sound further, being a jumbled mixture of melodic post hardcore (of the Yourcodenameis:Milo variety, not whiny 19 year old Thursday wannabes) and heavier sounds. At this point, both of us were writing lo-fi acoustic pop songs separate from the band. Eventually, the melodic side won out, and realising we were better at jangly indie stuff than shouty screamy angular nonsense, the sound unintentionally reverted back to something closely resembling that which we started with, and we began working on band arrangements of our solo songs. Cleverly, we chose this point to move to opposite ends of the country, and the project has hung in the air since. Needing a bass player, my beautiful girlfriend suggested maybe she could fill the role, what with her having a bass guitar and everything, and so became part of the collective. I put out the Second Thought sings The Curse of Kevin Carter EP last year, a halfway house containing the more experimental and electronic tracks I’d worked on, as an introduction to the project, and recently finished the first album, Almost a Leg. Although a solo project of mine, as I thought about expanding upon it, it seemed sensible to merge the band and the solo project, to form this rather bizarre occurance: The Curse of Kevin Carter. A tracklist for Almost a Leg is on the site linked above. We will be starting as an active band again within the next six months or so, and then exciting things will happen.

I spent a bit of today playing with some organ and rain sounds, and turning them into an incredibly long, beautiful ambient piece. It’s not done yet, I want to add some piano or guitar or something to it, but it’s turning out rather nicely. Not sure exactly what I’ll do with it yet, mind.

6th July 2011

With Sturmazdale complete, I find myself in an interesting position which I haven’t been in for some years: I don’t have a follow-up planned. Near the end of the Purlieu sessions, I had decided I wanted to record something that continued from the album, leading to Vacuum Road Songs. VRS was to lead on to the long-scrapped Dead Hymns; Safernoc gave me chance to record Since Every Hour, an album I’d wanted to do for years, and that direction pushed me to record a full on experimental classical album, Sturmazdale, via the ‘return to samples’ approach Leaf Pass. Now, however, I don’t have an album I ‘want’ to record. There’s no real musical or conceptual theme that I feel like I need to record next.

This doesn’t mean I’m out of ideas, but realising that I no longer feel tied to a series of linked albums is such a liberating feeling. I’ve actually got several ideas I want to work on. A couple are based entirely around field recordings, which is something I’ve wanted to do for ages, one is a re-recording of an old tape from 1997 named Cliff Edge, and I’m expanding upon the atonal sounds I played with on Sturmazdale by getting to grips with serial composition techniques. There’s also a bigger project I’m planning for a long way into the future. The main point is, it doesn’t matter which order these come out in. Album-wise, everything from Purlieu to Sturmazdale was sort of set in stone, whereas now, I can work on what I want, when I want, and release it when it’s finished (the release schedules that have plagued me so much over the last eighteen months are no more!). This is a wonderful feeling, and I think I’ll be able to record at a sensible speed from now on.

4th July 2011

The first album I’ll be releasing under my own name is done and label stuff is, staggeringly, sorted. It should be coming out on an established CDr label with whom it should be entirely at home. I’m very proud of the record actually… it’s a continuation of the modern classical sensibilities of Since Every Hour Is Too Late and a continuation of the melodies and sample-based textures of Purlieu. There are some atonal pieces and some more conventional almost Second Thought-ish tracks. The album will be called Sturmazdale, and the tracklist runs a little like this:

01. Oncoming Storm
02. Rain
03. Rectangles
04. Talnoa
05. The Deck
06. Upper Path
07. Hillside
08. Caves
09. 75
10. Underview
11. Vars
12. Lower Path
13. E Ccc

I really miss my guitar. I haven’t played it in at least a year. I was listening to Current 93’s Music from the Horse Hospital last night and it made me want to actually do some performance. A jam with other musicians. Once I’m settled somewhere, I want to find some musicians who’ll be interested in doing that. It’ll be nice to get back to actually playing music for once, as opposed to just sitting at the computer. I used to do that a lot more a few years ago (hmmm… nine or ten years ago), when guitar appeared much more in my music – on Second Thought or in my So Far So Good stuff – and when I did collaborations with Gregg and Laura and people. Purlieu even had a non-electronic track, Nsepan, which was performed by myself on piano and my friend John on viola. That kind of thing was great fun and I really miss being a musician sometimes, as well as a sound editor. Anyway, that’s something for the future.

19th June 2011

I sat ruminating on the various ways in which things have changed lately, particularly in regard to my music, how successful (or not) it is, and how I share it. Back around the time of Purlieu I was part of a few online music communities where many people shared their tracks, collaborated, worked on various remixes and generally enjoyed the whole process of sharing music with each other. This was one of the keys to the success of Purlieu upon its release, and its high sales. These days, there’s so much free music around that these kinds of places have little to no purpose anymore. My old haunt, the ArtistServer (ElectronicScene as it was at the time) forum is, like most music boards I read, plagued with continual ‘check out my new free release’ threads without any desire to engage with people. The whole online music world changed so drastically during my five year absence that I’ve not really managed to find a niche since returning a couple of years ago. Certainly the difference in sales and general interest between Since Every Hour Is Too Late and Purlieu is startling; this can be explained by both my lack of participation in relative music scenes, and the onslaught of music I’ve released lately – I’ll admit I wouldn’t be able to (or even want to) keep up with someone who’d released as much music as I have in the last 18 months, so I don’t blame people for giving up some time ago.

That said, it’s definitely given me food for thought and I realised I really do need to get involved in things more if I want people to recognise my music. I am hopefully going to work with different labels with my music in the future as I have neither the time nor money to distribute my music through Jerky Oats at the moment without the diminishing returns of late. The other thing I’ve realised is that live performance and getting involved with ‘scenes’ and such is an important factor. I’ve been sincerely worried about future live stuff as the direction I’m taking is much more towards the avant-garde, modern classical, experimental end of things, so the beat-laden synthfest of this year’s Awakenings show will be a long way away – but I’ve not had a clue how on Earth I’ll actually do it. Anyway, some reassurance from Lucy has given me more confidence, and I’ve begun putting a few ideas down for what I could do live. Ideally at some point in the future I’d like to take it away from a pure laptop thing, as I’m becoming increasingly interested in the use of acoustic sounds, but for the moment it’s a stripped back attempt, just using Ableton, but I’ve definitely come up with some interesting ideas which I’ll be expanding upon a lot in the coming months. I really would like to get some gigs next year and with a move closer to London on the horizon, I should be in a reasonable position to look for them!

Some titles which may be heading your direction next year… Talnoa, Sturmazdale, Upper & Lower Path.

23rd May 2011

It is with a mixture of sadness and relief that I have to announce the end of Second Thought at the end of 2011. This has been something I’ve wanted to say for a bit now, I was going to keep it quiet for longer but decided that it’s better to get it over and done with (also, I’m the least patient person ever, as anybody who knows me will tell you). There are several reasons for this, the first being I REALLY HATE THE NAME SECOND THOUGHT. I haven’t actually liked the name since around the time of Purlieu, but for one reason another, I kept it – largely to make a name for myself and so people remember me. However, after the last couple of years, the name doesn’t really mean anything anymore. A person coming to my music for the first time might imagine Second Thought as a dark ambient/drone project, or a modern classical one, or a harsh noise, or ambient, or dub techno, or even lo-fi indie project. The array of releases has put to rest any idea of an image or brand around the name, so it made me wonder why I would keep a name I don’t even like… Also, I do really love a big clear out and a chance to start again.

A few bits and bobs have changed recently, so it’s probably best to ignore my ‘no more music until next year’ promises, ha. I will be releasing one more full album as Second Thought, called Leaf Pass, which will be out in the autumn. It’s sort of a ‘return to Purlieu’ affair, containing some new material and a number of Purlieu era tracks which have been reworked, remixed and updated. I was planning on having it out in the future, but it works so nicely as a closing album as it ties up nicely with my first album, so I’ve decided to put it out this year instead.

At the end of the year there will be no more Second Thought and I will continue to work under my own name.

15th May 2011

Since Every Hour Is Too Late is available to pre-order – an immediate download as of now! I’m hoping to get the discs out on or before the 1st June release date. This is an exciting and relieving time for me. I’m very proud to get this album out, as it’s got some of my favourite work of mine on, and also it marks the end of a run of releases which has been almost non-stop since November 2009. The first track for the album was composed shortly after Safernoc was completed, back in October 2009, when I still lived in Manchester. Since then I’ve moved four times, scrapped a lot of recordings, finished four different mixes of this album and been through a lot of personal things – but come out of it in one piece and have this album to show for it. It breaks the pattern of my previous soundscape albums, containing individual tracks which each tell their own story. It is certainly my most melodic album to date, and the most personal, and probably the most sad sounding. I had a number of personal crises which led to the composition of some of the material here. Other pieces are portraits of birds I recorded for my fianceé, without whom I would not have got through this time. More than this, the album is the achievement of a long term goal. Many years ago, I was walking in Wales with my friend on a camping holiday, and the landscape, with some ruined buildings, inspired me to plan out an album of pieces for piano and strings that would reflect the ancient landscape. It was due to be my fourth album following Dead Hymns, themeatically acting as a spiritual reawakening after the trip through hell. This album might not have that conceptual wholeness which I over-planned, but it is an album of mostly string and piano arrangements, it is my fourth record, and it is in many ways a soundtrack to a time of readjustment and dealing with life. It might not have been quite the landscape record I imagined seven years ago, but it certainly is the melodic, modern classical album I wanted to record.

I’ve been working more on new material, which is definitely continuing with the classical theme, but that won’t be out for some time yet. After a barrage of material lately, this is the last new stuff I’ll be putting out until next year – it’ll be nice to get back to one or two albums a year. This album marks the end of a series of albums, and the end of a continuous run of releases (other than the outtakes split EP which will accompany it on 1st June, of course). I think May acts as the perfect closer to this era for me. Thank you to everybody who’s listened over all this time, and I hope you enjoy the album. 🙂